Advanced Disk backups (Synthetic and Tru Image)

[AdamM]

We have just purchased a couple of Data Domain Appliances and are now able to fully implement Synthetic and True Image backups.

My question is are there any size or number of file limits on a job that has the "Collect additional Information for Synthetics and True Image" box checked off.

Some of our backup jobs are over 1 terabyte and they seem to take forever to get started ( 2-3 hours before any data is backed up)  Is this normal?

Is it better to split these jobs into multiple jobs?

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thank you.

[AdamM]

Well I got no where a couple years ago when I tried implementing this feature. It worked for a couple of smaller shares, but the majority of our shares are over 1T. 

I am in the process of upgrading to BE 2010 and am thought maybe it would work better now that I am on a 64-bit machine but I am still having issues

I am trying to get the synthetic policy to work on our user home share.  It is about 2 T with about 7 Million files.  The Baseline backup takes days but eventually finished but had many errors on directories that couldn’t be backed up because they didn’t exist.  I assumed these were just folders that were present during the initial scan and removed before they actually got backed up. I also was hoping that the future incrementals would take care of anything.  Instead the future incrementals continue to back up almost everything again (and each take s couple days to run as well)  I let it go for over a week just in case it got itself together, but it did not.  I had to hold all those jobs and go back to the daily diffs. 

I am backing up everything to Data Domain boxes.

Does anyone have any suggestions or know of any limits for how much data the synthetic and true image backups can handle?  I honestly more interested in the True image restores than the synthetic backups. But both would be nice since we paid for the add-on.

Thanks,

Adam

[teiva-boy]

BackupExec will choke on that high of a file count.  Get a Symantec employee cornered in the room, the product historically choked on anything over 50,000 files + within a directory.  

There was a hotfix that was being tested in 12.5, but it was beta then and I don't think ever went anywhere.

I think I posted in your other thread, but you will need to look for a different solution in this use case.  Instead of the DD boxes, Avamar would have solved it for sure.